Guillermo Gonzalez (born 1963) is a Cuban-born American astronomer. He is a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is a proponent of intelligent design, a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God. He is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, which is considered the hub of the intelligent design movement, and a fellow with the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design, which also promotes intelligent design.
Education and career Gonzalez obtained a B.S. in 1987 in physics and astronomy from the University of Arizona and his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Washington in 1993. He has done post-doctoral work at the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Washington. He has received fellowships, grants and awards from NASA, the University of Washington, Sigma Xi, and the National Science Foundation. He supports the Galactic habitable zone concept, which was coined in 1986 by L.S. Marochnik and L.M. Mukhin, who defined the zone as the region in which intelligent life could flourish. Until May 2008 he was an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State University, then taught at Grove City College, an evangelical Christian school, and since 2013 is an assistant professor at Ball State University in Muncie. Gonzalez was a regular contributor to Facts for Faith magazine produced by Reasons To Believe, an old Earth creationist group. In addition to his work for the Discovery Institute and International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design, he is a researcher for the Biologic Institute, which is funded by the institute for research into intelligent design. In 2004 he published The Privileged Planet and its accompanying video, which takes the arguments of the Rare Earth hypothesis and combines them with arguments that the Earth is in prime location for observing the universe. He then proposes that the Earth was intelligently designed. William H. Jefferys, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, reviewed the book writing "the little that is new in this book isn't interesting, and what is old is just old-hat creationism in a new, modern-looking astronomical costume." Co-author Jay Richards responds to such criticism with the following statement: "It has absolutely nothing to do with biological evolution. We are talking about the things that you need to produce a habitable planet, which is a prerequisite for life. It doesn't tell you anything about how life got here." A documentary based on the book was produced by the Discovery Institute. His primary research interest is studying radial velocity and transit techniques for the detection of extrasolar planets.
Iowa State University tenure denial
Faculty statement Two years prior to his consideration for tenure, approximately 130 members of the faculty of Iowa State University signed a statement co-authored by associate professors James Colbert and Hector Avalos and assistant professor Michael Clough opposing "all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor." Similar statements were issued by faculty at the University of Northern Iowa and at the University of Iowa. A total of approximately 400 professors signed the three petitions. No mention of Gonzalez was made in these petitions, and the professors maintained the statement "was in no way targeted specifically at Gonzalez", that Tom Ingebritsen, an associate professor in the Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, had been advocating, and teaching a course in, Intelligent Design at ISU for a number of years before Gonzales arrived, and that "[a]t that time [the] statement began to circulate, Dr. Gonzalez was not well-known as an ID advocate to most faculty even at ISU". Avalos also criticized the Discovery Institute for "combining sentences from different sections of [the statement] in order create a fragmented syntax that appears to target Gonzalez":
Here is [sic] the three original sentences, snippets of which were recombined by the Discovery Institute:
Intelligent Design has become a significant issue in science education, and it has now established a presence, even if minimal, at Iowa State University. Accordingly, if you are concerned about the negative impact of Intelligent Design on the integrity of science and on our university, please consider signing the "Statement on Intelligent Design by Iowa State University Faculty" below. We, therefore, urge all faculty members to uphold the integrity of our university of "science and technology," convey to students and the general public the importance of methodological naturalism in science, and reject efforts to portray Intelligent Design as science.[emphasis in original] Two years later, an article in the local newspaper The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported Gonzalez's appeal against his denial of tenure and claimed he was "the unnamed target" of the ISU petition. The article noted that "Gonzalez won't discuss the reasons for the tenure denial" but that he "noted...that he has frequently been criticized by people who don't consider intelligent design as a legitimate science." Comments from John West, the associate director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture – at which Gonzalez was a senior fellow – blamed the failure to secure tenure directly upon Gonzalez's belief in intelligent design and compared it to a "doctrinal litmus test" typical of his native Cuba.
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